The art market and the disappearance of the eye
When price becomes the only measure, the ability to see vanishes.
The art market and the disappearance of the eye
When price becomes the only measure, the ability to see vanishes.
Don Thompson describes in The $12 Million Stuffed Shark how the contemporary art market functions as a system in which value is determined not by what you see but by what you pay. A work by Damien Hirst is not expensive because it is visually compelling. It is expensive because Hirst is expensive. The circular reasoning is the system.
Jerry Saltz, critic at New York Magazine, makes a similar point in Art Is Life from a different perspective. He describes how the art world increasingly revolves around collectors who buy art as a financial instrument, galleries that operate as brand stores, fairs where the transaction replaces the experience. The result is not that good art is no longer being made. The result is that the ability to recognize good art is vanishing, among the public and among the buyers alike.
That ability, what you might call "the eye," is not innate. It is developed through looking extensively, comparing, learning what moves you and why. It is a form of literacy, comparable to learning to read a market or learning to assess ingredients. And just like those other forms of literacy, it is undermined by a system that eliminates the need for it.
Why learn to look when the price tells you what is good? Why form a judgment when a gallery owner does it for you? Why spend time with a work you do not understand when you can buy what has proven to appreciate in value?
The parallel with food is exact. Just as the supermarket eliminates the need to read a market, the art market eliminates the need to look. What remains is consumption without connoisseurship, possession without understanding, status without substance.
The alternative is not populist anti-elitism. The alternative is restoring the eye as a basic competence. Go to museums without an audio tour. Stand long before a single work. Describe to yourself what you see before reading the label. That is not an elitist hobby. It is the fundamental human skill of giving meaning to what you perceive.
Sources: Don Thompson, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Jerry Saltz, Art Is Life (Riverhead, 2022).
Source: Jerry Saltz, Art Is Life (Riverhead, 2022); Don Thompson, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)